Some subscribers to xxxxxx might be interested in a recent post "Re: Keystone XL: The Pipeline to Disaster" [Hake (2013)]. The abstract reads:

************************************************ABSTRACT: In his LA Times OpEd "Keystone XL: The Pipeline to Disaster," James Hansen at <http://lat.ms/16zLDF0> wrote: "In March, the State Department gave the president cover to open a big spigot that will hitch our country to one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth for 40 years or more. . . . . A public comment period is underway through April 22, after which the department will prepare a final statement to help the administration decide whether the pipeline is in the 'national interest.'. . . . . .THE PERSPECTIVE OF PIPELINE APOLOGISTS IS CONTRARY TO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND BASIC ECONOMICS. . . . [[My CAPS]]. . . ., neither of which gives a damn about politics. . . . . . . . All of president Obama's achievements will fade if he doesn't act swiftly and decisively on climate change. Rejecting keystone is the first step."

A day before Hansen's OpEd appeared, Bill McKibben in "John Kerry's Fateful Decision on the Keystone Pipeline" at <http://bit.ly/XsIS7X> urged people to send Kerry a million public comments at <http://bit.ly/16CvA9q>.************************************************

REFERENCES [URL shortened by <http://bit.ly/> and accessed on 05 April 2013.]

Hake, R.R. 2013. "Re: Keystone XL: The Pipeline to Disaster," online on the OPEN Net-Gold archives at <http://yhoo.it/10lFYzV>. Post of 05 April 16:37-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post were transmitted to several discussion lists and are on my blog "Hake'sEdStuff" at <http://bit.ly/10DV42q> with a provision for comments.

McKibben, B. 2012. "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is," Rolling Stone, 19 July; online at <http://rol.st/12umI3l>. McKibben wrote: "When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, YOU JUST NEED TO DO A LITTLE MATH. . . . .[[My CAPS]]. . . . For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious - our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless - position with three simple numbers: . . . . .2° Celsius, 565 Gigatons, and 2,795 Gigatons."